Return to Me
by MizJoely
Summary: Molly is fighting for her life after Moriarty's dramatic (and unwanted) return. Sherlock tells John how the two of them first met...and about their secret marriage. Angsty but with a Sherlolly ending because I may like to make them suffer but I'll always have a payoff for them and my readers.
1. Unconscious

_A/N: No, I'm not insane. But I did start posting this on tumblr so I figured I might as well put it up here and on AO3 as well. This will be a short, angsty little story with a happy ending because you know that's how I roll, lol. Someone had put a post on tumblr commenting that if they found out in Series 4 that Molly and Sherlock had been secretly married since uni they would love it, and that...turned into this. I hope you enjoy the ride!_

* * *

The steady beeps and pings of the machinery were the only sounds in the room besides the soft aspirations of the respirator. Sherlock held his wife's hand – the one with no needles stuck into the soft, pale flesh – in his and gazed unseeingly out the window of her hospital room.

It was the second time he'd seen Molly like this, so fragile and lifeless, the machines doing the work of keeping her alive, while he was left to wonder if she'd ever wake up again. And if she did wake up, who would she be? Would she remember him this time, or forget him as she had the first time?

It didn't make it any better to know that both times she'd ended up like this had been entirely his own fault.

The sound of the door opening behind him was simply catalogued as another noise, as were the quiet footsteps that approached. Not a doctor or a nurse, the soles of the shoes were smooth leather rather than thick rubber, and he knew without turning who it would be even before John spoke.

"How is she doing?"

Sherlock waved toward the chart at the foot of Molly's bed. St. Bart's was modern in many ways but still clung to some old-fashioned habits. Such as physical, paper patient charts to go along with the electronic tablets doctors and nurses were provided with. Of course the families and visitors weren't supposed to touch it; of course this was Sherlock Holmes and the staff were long familiar with his disregard of the rules.

Especially when it came to this particular patient.

Sherlock's eyes remained focused on nothing as John quietly stepped to the foot of the bed and lifted the chart, scanning the latest entries and letting out a quiet sigh when he finished. That quiet sigh spoke volumes to his friend; nothing had changed, Molly was neither regressing nor improving…and there was still no way to know if the head injury had caused any sort of damage to her mind and memories.

There was a squeak and the sound of someone – John – dropping heavily into the chair on the opposite side of the bed, nearer to the window. "Sherlock. Sherlock!"

He blinked and focused his eyes on the other man, but not before dropping his gaze to take in Molly's unconscious form. A spasm of guilt wracked him, and he resolutely looked away. It wasn't the same as last time; it wouldn't turn out the same as last time.

He wouldn't let it.

John was looking at him, waiting patiently for him to respond, and when he did, his voice was a hoarse croak; when had he last spoken? Hours ago, days? Certainly not recently, not when the doctors and nurses had nothing to report, nothing to offer but worthless platitudes and reassurances he didn't need. "Yes, John?"

The older man leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and clasping his hands together as he said quietly, "Wanna tell me about it now?"

Sherlock sighed and lowered his gaze, watching as his thumb stroked the back of Molly's limp hand, over and over again. "Fine," he said after a long minute. He cleared his throat, and John instantly reached for the pitcher of water sat on the window ledge. Sherlock waited until he'd poured the water and passed it over, then drank it down thirstily, feeling a surge of guilt at the knowledge that Molly could only take her nourishment via IV at the present time.

Everything he could do, that she could not, weighed on him now.

But John was his friend, whether he deserved him or not, and he'd made a request.

So Sherlock told him.

**New Year's Eve, 1999-2000**

"It's ridiculous, the actual millennium doesn't begin until New Year's Day 2001."

The deep baritone caught Molly's attention, not only because it was rather compelling but also because it sounded more than a bit familiar. She and her friend Meena had come out for the massive New Year's celebration, and of all the people to run into in their favorite bar, she hadn't expected it to be the annoying prat from her chemistry class.

She turned to see who he was annoying, faintly relieved that it was his friend – the only one he had, from what she could tell – Victor Trevor. Who simply grinned and took a deep gulp of his lager before slapping Sherlock on the back and laughing. "No one cares, mate. It's not the point."

"Then what is the point?" Sherlock demanded, somehow managing to look both haughty and bewildered.

Well. _That_ was certainly a new look on him; could it be there was something the mighty Sherlock Holmes didn't understand? Aside from how to talk to people without annoying them, that is.

She was distracted from her blatant eavesdropping by the unexpected sight of Meena rushing over and throwing her arms around Victor, giving him a resounding kiss. Wait, so _that_ was her mystery boyfriend? Molly was confused; she'd actually thought that he and Sherlock were together, not simply good friends, but apparently that belief was entirely wrong. Interesting.

Even more interesting was her reaction to this discovery; yes, she was happy for Meena, but why was she feeling so relieved at the same time? After all, just because Victor wasn't Sherlock's boyfriend didn't mean he fancied girls after all…

"Oh, fuck!" she exclaimed as realization dawned. She didn't just pay attention to Sherlock because he was an annoying know-it-all; he didn't just get on her last nerve because of his air of aloof superiority…she actually fancied him! How the hell had that happened? Yes, he was gorgeous, with that head of luscious, unruly curls he was constantly having to shake out of his eyes, and those cat-like blue-green eyes with their fascinating flecks of amber, and those lips…

Cursing again, Molly jerked away from the trio, trying to get herself under control, then cursed even louder as she spilled her beer down the front of her dress. Meena was too busy kissing Victor to notice, but apparently Sherlock had seen the whole thing, as he suddenly appeared by Molly's side with a wad of napkins in his hand. "Here," he said abruptly, thrusting them at her.

Molly caught the napkins and stared up at him, too off-balance to say anything. He frowned and peered down at her. "Are you drunk? You can't possibly be drunk, you never drink in excess even for such frivolous occasions as this one; this is your first drink of the night and you've barely had two sips of it. You're not normally clumsy, I've seen you in class and you handle the scientific equipment and glassware with a great deal of assurance. Therefore something else has distracted or disturbed you this evening." His eyes narrowed and he pulled back. "You aren't jealous of your friend and Victor, are you? You're not secretly in love with him or something ridiculous like that?"

Molly stared at him, wide-eyed, and slowly shook her head. Sherlock continued to study her, when his lips curled in a sudden, delighted smile and he reached out and very deliberately took back the napkins and laid them on the bar. "Molly Hooper. I do believe we share more than simply a common passion for science."

"Wh-what do you mean?" she stammered out, and his smile deepened into something darkly seductive as he responded, lowering his mouth to whisper in her ear.

"Oh, Molly, I think you know _exactly_ what I mean."

And so it was that, when midnight eventually came round, Meena Parker and Victor Trevor were busy shagging one another into the mattress in his flat, while Sherlock Holmes and Molly Hooper were doing the same thing to each other in hers.


	2. Wreckage

_A/N: Sorry for the lengthy delay, but I had writer's block which has thankfully cleared, whoo hoo! Thanks to all for reading and reviewing and favoriting, you guys rock!_

_Sherlock reveals what happened after he and Molly were married...and it isn't pretty. Warnings for a car accident._

* * *

**The Present**

John studied Sherlock as he fell silent, gazing down at Molly's unconscious form. The story of how they'd first started their personal relationship had been…not at all what John had expected, actually. He wondered if his friend had deduced Molly's rather racy thoughts about him or if she'd told him about it. Most likely a combination of the two, of course, and entirely irrelevant at the moment.

No, it didn't matter if Sherlock had deduced or Molly had confessed, not when she was lying here, fighting for her life after Jim Moriarty had done his level best to end it. Bastard was really dead this time; thank God for Mary's skills with a pistol.

Too bad she and John hadn't arrived on the scene just a few seconds sooner, or this tragedy in the making might have been averted.

He thought Sherlock might have been finished speaking for a while, or maybe wasn't ready to share what must have been an unhappy ending to this early, promising start to his relationship with Molly, and was a bit startled when his friend picked up the thread of the narrative again, a few minutes later.

"No one knew we were seeing one another," he said. "Not even Meena and Victor. At first it was partly because neither of us could bear the idea of the relentless teasing we'd receive, and partly because it was…something rather special," he added, sounding wistful. Imagine that; Sherlock Holmes sounding wistful. But then, considering the tender looks he was casting on Molly's unconscious form, perhaps it wasn't so hard to imagine after all.

"Sounds like you kept up the not-telling," John prompted after a moment. If Sherlock didn't want to talk about it, he wouldn't have added on to the first bit he'd shared.

The other man nodded. "Yes. For six months. Even Mycroft didn't know, or at least, I thought he didn't," Sherlock added with a scowl. "But of course he knew everything…including the fact that my drug use was getting out of hand."

That, in fact, had led to several fights with Molly, once she'd found out. And of course she'd found out; how could she not, when they were practically living together? Sherlock had moved out of the dorms and into a cramped bed-sit on Montague Street, citing the need for privacy in order to keep up his studies. His parents had accepted that excuse, although Mycroft had given Sherlock more than a few hard looks during his younger brother's carefully worded presentation at a family dinner. A dinner to which he didn't bring Molly; he wasn't ready for his family to know about her, for her to be subjected to Mycroft's withering sarcasm and his parents' eccentricities and Sherrinford…no, best not to think about Sherrinford.

"Who's Sherrinford?" John asked, interrupting Sherlock's rambling narrative.

He narrowed his eyes at his friend; had he truly spoken that part aloud? Apparently he had, for John continued to look at him expectantly. "My oldest brother," Sherlock finally said. "He came to a bad end and that's all I have to say on that matter. At least for now," he added, noting John's flash of hurt, quickly buried under an impassive demeanor. "But he did get to meet Molly." His lips twisted in a bitter smile. "Unfortunately, it was after the accident."

John tensed; he'd known there was something terrible coming, something awful that had happened for Molly and Sherlock to have gone from young lovers in college to…whatever their current relationship could be called. "Brain injury, was it?" he asked quietly.

Sherlock nodded, a sharp jerk of his head, his eyes once again focused on Molly. For a moment he saw her, not as she was now, but as she had been that long-ago day; similarly unconscious, her head bandaged, her shoulder-length hair carefully shaved off on the left side of her head, tubes and wires, medication and transfused blood entering her fragile, damaged form.

All his fault. Both times.

No point in hiding it from anyone, especially not from John. "We had rather impulsively decided to get married when she was accepted into medical school. Too much alcohol and…other substances, at least on my part. Not that I regretted it when we woke up husband and wife the next morning," he added quickly, casting a glance at John, curiosity and dread fighting for control of his emotions as he looked for the expected expression of condemnation in his friend's eyes.

He was caught off-guard when he saw only sympathy and understanding; after how long it had taken John to forgive him , after his two-year 'death' – and then only as quickly as it had because Sherlock had essentially cheated his way back into John's life – he'd expected at the most neutrality from John. It had taken him months to forgive Mary; what was different this time?

Something of his confusion must have shown as John's eyes crinkled with amusement. "Sherlock, I may be a slow learner, but I do learn. Things I thought were unforgiveable aren't; as my therapist once pointed out, very few things in life are black and white. So I've learned – through some rather painful experiences, granted," he interrupted himself to add, "that life is best viewed in those shades of grey people are always talking about. Besides," he added shrewdly, leaning forward a bit and clasping his hands together, "I think you've spent the larger part of the past – what, fifteen years, is it? – punishing yourself. So you two got married drunk and high…what happened then?"

Sherlock sighed and reached into his pocket, pulling out a pair of simple gold wedding bands strung together on a cheap metal chain. He unclipped the chain, pulled off the larger of the two and, after a brief hesitation, put it on his finger. He held the other one up and gazed at it, then, with a sharp nod as if confirming something to himself, slipped it onto Molly's ring finger. "We got married, we decided to stay married, we were happy for a few days, I was taking her to meet my family…and I fucked up. Royally."

Comprehension dawned, and with a flicker of sympathetic horror in John's blue eyes. "You drove while you were high."

Sherlock nodded, eyes closing as a surge of shame washed over him. "Yes. I'd told Molly I'd quit, and I thought I had it under control, but I ran into an…acquaintance…when I was leasing the car, we got to chatting…I was an idiot," he said, opening his eyes but unable to meet John's gaze at all. He couldn't even bring himself to look at Molly's face, only her hand, with the gold band once again on her finger, where it hadn't rested for fifteen long years. "She realized I was high, we argued, she wanted me to stop the car, to pull over and let her out and I…" He let out a long, shuddering breath before continuing. "I told her that this was who she'd married, that it said a lot about her taste in men that she'd fall for a junkie and a sociopath…and some even more awful things."

"Is that…that Christmas, the party, when she was wearing that dress and you thought she was meeting up with someone after…is that why? When she said that to you…"

"That I always said such awful things? Always?" Sherlock repeated the words he'd heard from Molly's lips on two very different occasions, his own lips twisting with self-hatred as he nodded in answer to John's not-quite-a-question. "It literally stunned me, John, to hear those words from her. I'd suppressed a lot of things about the two of us, had tried my best to delete her from my mind after the accident, but those words brought it all back. And when I realized that she hadn't said it deliberately, that it was no different than if her mind had conjured up a line of dialogue from a movie she'd seen once and mostly forgotten…" He shrugged. "I apologized to her. At least this time she could hear me..."

**oOo**

He woke up, dizzy, disoriented, blinking some kind of dripping wetness from his eyes, brushing it away, then freezing in horror as the metallic tang of freshly-spilt blood reached his nostrils. He blinked again harder, tried to move, but found he couldn't. Then his bleary vision snapped into focus, along with the laser-sharpness of his mind, and he remembered everything. The wedding. The blissful honeymoon. The decision to take Molly to meet his family and introduce her as his wife.

Meeting up with Greg _Dvořák, who'd signaled that he was still in a position to provide Sherlock with any number of illegal substances…and which offer Sherlock had eagerly taken up, sparing only a second to wonder guiltily how Molly would feel if she knew he'd broken his promise to stay clean. Then the coke had hit his system and all worries fell away until Molly caught on and the argument between them became a screaming match and then she was screaming in terror as the car swerved into oncoming traffic and the headlights and the blaring of horns and screeching of brakes and a tremendous jolt and then…nothing. Darkness. Silence._

_Until now. Until he'd awoken with blood on his face, dripping, dripping._

_Not his blood._

_The car had fetched up on its side; Molly hung limply from her seatbelt, her hair hanging down and blocking her face from his view, but the blood was coming from beneath that, far too much of it._

_Vaguely Sherlock became aware that someone was screaming for help; he only realized it was him when he broke into a fit of coughing and the hoarse screams abruptly stopped. Then hands were reaching for him, voice were calling to him, but he fought them as he tried to make them help Molly, as he insisted he was fine (he wasn't, actually; he had a broken arm and various scrapes and contusions that left him looking like something from a stage production of Frankenstein for weeks after) and tried to staunch the flow of blood streaming from her head._

_Mercifully, unconsciousness took him again at that point, as he struggled against the emergency rescue crew who were trying to pull him free of the wreckage._


End file.
